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This blog page has been launched to promote femininity and female empowerment, and to raise visibility of Fascinating Womanhood: an international femininity movement and guide to help women make their marriage into a lifelong love affair in the bestselling book written by Helen B. Andelin.

My husband was away on a four-month oceanographic research expedition off the coast of Peru for the US government when I took the F.W. class. These expeditions have been his life. For the past 5 years, the trips have been longer than the usual 6 weeks, but always they are professionally exciting and all our men friends envied the color and glamour of his life.

As for me, I was beginning to think I had all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of a divorce. Growing resentment colored all the facets of my life. The task of keeping the house and four children fed and clothed grew harder, and I was beginning to find my children increasingly irritating. As the resentments grew, I found his times at home less and less a pleasure. I could feel frightening hatred beginning to build up within me toward my husband. I have never hated anyone before in my life.

Though we weathered many serious storms, our marriage seemed to be drifting towards the shoals, and we both seemed helpless and powerless to do anything to rescue it. We even talked about it. Did other people have this problem?

Of one thing I was certain. I simply did not understand men! I sat spellbound for two hours in the first F.W. class, listening as question after question that had bugged me for years was being answered. When students challenged the teacher, she said with assurance, “Try it”! What a well of joy arose in my heart. I felt the exhilaration of finding religion!

The first shock of the F.W. class jolted me out of my former pattern of thinking. I had the courage, for the first time in my life, to look inward, not out there for someone to blame. In the honest probing I found something (unknown to me before) that stood out like the neon light! Many of the things which are in F.W. are actually things my husband tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen. Also, the times in our marriage we had enjoyed long stretches of happiness and satisfaction, were the times I was unconsciously going along with its teachings.

Over and over again I can see a long series of mistakes. Now I marvel that this proud, brilliant man did not leave me long ago. I wept at the humiliations I had inflicted on him. How many other women, through lack of understanding, continue to wound the men they have professed to love?

I started to write him letters, applying the principles of F.W. as best I could, and undoing my mistakes. I also talked with him by phone, and due to my changed attitude, I immediately noticed a warm response in my husband. He even called me “Darling” a few phone calls later.

One of his letters included a brochure on his present expedition. It is so exciting and represents the peak of his career. Even though I have wanted for 23 years to have him resign his ship and spend his life with me and the children, it came to me “crystal clear” that I really didn’t have the right to ask him to give up work in which he finds so much genuine joy. I told him this in my next letter.

To my surprise, his next letter ran down his job. He said he was disappointed in much that I had taken for granted as exciting. The unbelievable part is that he is resigning his position and coming home to us! He is buying a farm in Washington where we can all be together permanently. His letter now say, “Hurry June!” That’s the month he gets back home.